


An Actual Dorito Stops for Locos Tacos

by jenphalian



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Taco Bell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-15
Updated: 2015-11-15
Packaged: 2018-05-01 19:45:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5218454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenphalian/pseuds/jenphalian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set a little while after Winter Soldier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Actual Dorito Stops for Locos Tacos

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OddityBoddity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OddityBoddity/gifts), [zarhooie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zarhooie/gifts).



> Thank you @zarhooie for stopping at taco smell this afternoon, and for looking up the Russian word for winter, and for just generally existing.

"Yeah... better make it two dozen of those."

"Will that be all?"

"Yeah. Wait, no. What's in a Quesarito?" He carefully sounds out each syllable. Future fast food is weird. Steve's been running through the streets of DC again, his search depressingly unsuccessful. It never tires him out, but he has to eat a lot afterward.

"Seasoned beef, rice, and like cheesy queso? They're pretty good. Plus they're like... rolled up, you know?" Steve does not know. He orders a dozen of them. And six Crunch Wrap Supremes, because those sound hideous and he needs to put them in his stomach like now. He has to wait while they send the order back to the grill. The kid at the counter, Franny, takes the next customer. Apparently Taco Bell of Bladensburg Road is not, in fact, prepared to immediately satisfy the hunger cravings of a sad super soldier who has yet again lost his best friend.

The floor has a grey mark on it where Steve is pacing around waiting. He kicks at it and realizes the mark is a smear from his own sneaker when another one appears next to it. Someone back in the kitchen is saying some inventively terrible things in at least three languages about the unreasonable amount of food he has been directed to prepare. Steve takes a deep breath and tries to steady himself. Fast food employees don't make enough money, they work hard, he shouldn't be mad at them, it isn't their fault he's so stressed, but it's just some tacos and seriously how long can it even take to get a guy's order?

There's a fresh dent in the counter and Steve realizes he started yelling somewhere in the middle of that little self-pep-talk. Everyone in the place is silent now, like Bucky's silent screamstare watching Steve fall eleventy hundred feet out of the crashing helicarrier.

"Sorry. I'm sorry." He looks at the look that Franny has fixed on him and ducks his head and starts shouldering his way out of the stupid Taco Bell.

"Hey! Buddy!" Steve turns back toward the counter. "You the guy with the two dozen Doritos Locos Tacos?"

"Yeah, sorry--" he stops. The man with the armload of sad trash food is familiar. His brown hair is in a shaggy man-bun under the hairnet. He's wearing long sleeves but the left hand is metal. The nametag pinned on his stained apron reads "Zima."

"Oh my god. Bucky?"

The Winter Soldier's eyes widen. "Oh _merde._ "

"Oh my god," Steve says again. "Just look at you. You're like an international shitshow."

"Yeah, you're one to talk. Do you even know what we cook this stuff with?" Bucky gives the sacks a little shake. "I should have known it could only be you ordering ninety hundred barf tacos."

They stand there, separated by three wrecked helicarriers, two destroyed secret organizations, five sacks of dubious but delicious food, and about seven decades. The whole store is still quiet, waiting for the fight to start. Steve steps forward and takes the bags, and then his reflexive politeness kicks in and he says thank you but it comes out as a question.

"This job sucks about as much as hauling fish in summer in Brooklyn and I'm living in a tree in the Arboretum, but somehow you look even worse off. What the fuck, man?"

"I... I've been looking for you. And watch your language."

Another moment passes, and then Bucky pulls off the apron and crumples it together with the hairnet. He turns to the counter and tosses the bundle at the lady who's come up front and pushed Franny protectively behind her. "Hey Maureen, I quit." Maureen looks down at the apron in her hands, bemused. Then Bucky pulls the front panel off the Pepsi dispenser and pulls two guns and six knives out of the guts of it.

"Franny, call the cops." Maureen is handing her the store's cordless phone.

"Maureen. There's a guy in the way back of the freezer behind everything. He's a very bad guy but you don't have to worry about him because he is dead. Your Homeland Security will be interested. And look inside the bottom box of fire sauce packets, I left some cash in there but I probably don't have time for that now." He's pushing Steve through the kitchen while he tells her this and then they're through the back door, running across parking lots.

When Sam and Natasha catch up to them, summoned by the call from the flip phone Natasha programmed for Steve, they're sitting under a tree, one sack full of balled-up taco wrappers and another one full of weapons. Bucky is still trying to explain all of the really obvious clues he left in a trail for Steve to find him. "Really? You never got curious about a grave marked with the day they found you in ice and the name Sarah Peggy Rogers on it?"

"No, because I don't go around looking at fake graves! And if I did, I wouldn't be counting the flowers on them either!"

"I don't even know how you and SHIELD won. You're an idiot. It's like you don't have any spy training at all."

"That's because he doesn't." Natasha is chewing gum. "C'mon, idiots. We're gonna take you home."


End file.
